Beyond Spectacle
Subtitle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: July 21, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9780802035400
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries; Women Authors; Social Science; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; History: World; Literary Criticism & Collections / Women Authors; Women's Studies - General
First sentence: In No. 46 of Addison and Steele's Spectator, a letter is published from an 'Ogling Master' wishing to show the Spectator his manuscript, The Compleat Ogler, wherein he claims to have perfected the 'whole Art of Ogling,' including the 'Church Ogle' and the 'Playhouse Ogle' (1: 199).
Description: "Combining close readings of Eliza Haywood's work with twentieth-century debates among feminist and psychoanalytic theorists concerning the visual dynamics of identity and gender formation, Merritt explores insights into how the gaze operates socially, epistemologically, and ontologically in Haywood's writing, ultimately concluding that Haywood's own strategy as an author involved appropriating the spectator position as a means of exercising female power. Beyond the Spectacle will cement Haywood's deservedly prominent place in the canon of eighteenth-century fiction and position her as a writer whose work speaks not only to female agency, but to eighteenth-century writers, gender relations, and power politics as well."--BOOK JACKET.